Vale John Clarke #PutOutYourGumboots

No more will Clarke & Dawe slyly skewer the doublespeak abounding in public life. It’s been my Thursday night highlight for years, that tightly crafted jewel of scathing simplicity. I will miss that 3 minutes each week immensely.

I remember first running across John Clarke in “The Gillies Report” and “The Gillies Republic”, and just loving his deadpan delivery of the farnarkling results as part of the in-show “news” broadcast. It was the eighties, I’d grown up watching deadly serious commentators on the ABC talking about the footy (AFL) and the cricket for years, and I loved the way he ripped the heck out of the whole business without so much as twitching an eyelid.

When I was in high school, we were handed a copy of “Fred Dagg on Real Estate”, which, once I understood that Fred Dagg was the same bloke who did the farnarkling results, cracked me up completely, because I could just about hear it in my head being read out in those same deadpan tones. Re-reading it today reminds me firstly, how little has actually changed in real estate in forty years, and secondly, how much we’re going to miss this guy.